Kezzle

Thanks for provoking it in the first place More variety means more chances of fun interactions. NQ should definitely do that. Would give everyone choices to make between the limitations they accept on their ships. It can be big and slow (and easy to hit) and do most things passably well, or medium and select one thing from a long list to do very well, or small and fast and hard to hit, but can only be really good at one or two fields. Or something like that. Simplicity breeds stupid metas, as we are seeing. It would be great if one of those roles was "fleet coordination", a ship which (aside from anything else) carries lots of sensors and can act as the eyes for their mates. I'd be happy if they weren't even interpolated, just picking the 'nearest to normal face' of the build box as presented at the moment the signal is assessed. Trying to get tooo analogue will make sums hard for the hamsters. Aye, sloped sides and no acute angles... the "rules" they use could be "tweaked" a little away from pure realism to permit other cool shapes. Where rounded surfaces are dreadful for stealth IRL, in DU, they could specify "planes parallel with the faces of the build box" as being the "worst". I think calculating a "simplified" set of RCS values at the point you leave Build Mode on the thing would be doable. Wouldn't it just? I hope the team have the programming chops to pull something like this off. It means a second set of signatures to keep track of for every ship-to-ship interaction, but the frequency of changes to the values being calculated could be managed using "cooldowns" and "warmups" so people weren't strobing about with their emitters on-off-on-off as fast as they can toggle 'em... I either missed that or erased it from memory. Was it typical MMO "invisibility cloak" nonsense? Yeah. I'd read about signal processing being applied similarly to the radar/microwave background for the detection of aircraft, too, though IIRC, it was much more hypothetical. That would be another great feature if they could fit it in: different kinds of sensors: no point being radio-silent if your reactor neutrino emissions give you away, and no point neutrino shielding your reactor if your mass signature gives you away. But radio sensors are cheap and plentiful, neutrino detectors expensive, finicky and rare, and gravitometers good enough to pick up a spaceship in a timely fashion really only happen on the largest most stable space stations, say. This, a thousand, a million times. Of course there are computational limits, but push them, don't get lazy, you crazy programming dudes. And fix your materials. This too. We can understand some of the arbitrary limitations while the game grows and settles, but please don't use them as a crutch when you've the talent to solve actually hard problems.

I wish they wouldn't keep surprising us. Though telling us about anything well in advance would be a surprise in and of itself... I do worry sometimes, looking at some bits of the game, whether NQ know anything at all, but mostly I try and remain optimistic that some of the crazier choices are just placeholders thrown in at a couple of hours' notice because they just didn't have time to do it right yet. Even then, they didn't use anyone with a science background to cobble their materials selection or industry recipes together. Fluorine voxels? Solid construction material made from a gas that will eat your lunch, then your face, then your skull, then your cousin's? Even with magic nanotech, there are eleventy billion better options. Gold and marble being the best armour? Seen any gold tanks, at defense shows lately? Thought not. Did the Warthog have a marble bathtub for the pilot to sit in? Stuff like this makes me doubt. Stuff I'm not allowed to talk about makes me doubt. But the game exists, and that gives me hope.

I don't mean to minimise your concerns. They're valid points. I think perhaps we can still remain optimistic that NQ have thought of most of them, and will be introducing mechanics that mean the worst fears won't come to pass, and current... suboptimal conditions will, conversely, pass. Personally I am optimistic that the systems NQ implement around Territory Warfare will mean that there will be little "random vandalism". If someone attacks your base, it will be for a reason, and they will have to expend significant effort, time and treasure to press their attack. So if your soaring spires and twinkling minarets are destroyed, you may well be able to rebuild them without fear that they'll get destroyed again. Maybe not in the same place if the reason was "I want that hex", and you lose. Unless you get on the bad side of an entire ORG to the extent that they want to hound you to the ends of the universe, at which point, building pretty palaces should be the least of your concerns. There is currently a voxel repair tool for dynamic cores. If your static has been wrecked, your only option is to re-deploy it from BP with new voxels. You can BP statics, in case you didn't know. And it seems likely to me that if your hex has been attacked to the point of ruining your buildings, you'll be having to rebuild from the ground up, somewhere else, because just wrecking your buildings won't be worth the expenditure it takes, unless something very personal has gone on; they'll want to take your land, and whatever elements you didn't manage to pack up and spirit away before your shields fell. I imagine the burghers of Cologne would have loved something as straightforward as a Bloop for their beautiful cathedral. Would have saved a lot of restoration work. Coventry just decided to make a new one and tack it on the side of the old ruin. I guess the point is that people are going to have to learn to deal with the destruction of their creations. This should be easier to come to terms with when you separate your creativity from the construct you made. You'll have a safe space on a Sanctuary Moon where you can keep a library of blueprints, even an entire Industry and stockpiles to rebuild what you've made, with a comparatively trivial effort. There's no reason a broken spire needs to remain un-rebuilt. This is true. Tarring all PvP enthusiasts with the "don't care about creativity" brush isn't a fair assessment though. Some of the most avid hunters I know are involved in prestige building projects. I'm in a PvP centric org, but the bosses will not adopt ugly ship designs as "Org equipment", and we regularly get people asking to buy our gear when they see it. We'll be in the ship-selling game when the shipwrights' IP can properly be protected. And there would be no point to it. If everything anyone ever needed could be made in the massive safe zone, that would be where all the ORG HQs would be, churning out ships to what? Go conquer land that's unnnecessary? And no war could ever be prosecuted to the "bitter end" because there would always be an inviolable, fully developed resource base from which the defeated ORG could recover. If someone didn't want PvP, why did they sign up to the game? FFA, pervasive PvP has been part of the offering since the game was first conceived. The reflection of your statement is: I don't see the need to deny PvP to those who were promised it and are only here because of that promise. If you look south from your base, you should see some really cool buildings coming along (Howdy neighbour, by the way! ). We have a few "industrial sheds", which were a necessity to get started quicly, but every town has those; they'll provide contrast for the control tower, and the chop shop and the other things people are putting up. My only building is a shoddy mess, right now, but it was a workbench to learn how industry works, and I'm making plans to prettify it. Same with my speeder, but I'm starting to learn how voxels work, now. Come over and visit The Anvil, and you'll see that PvP organisations also take pride in the appearance of their ships. Sometimes the functional bits detract from the overall look, but our head shipwright always likes to put an aesthetic on his creations. We have several people in the org who are in the game explicitly to play with the voxels. It's early days yet. Do come visit. If anyone's giving you problems, we might be able to help out. One thing that the very threat of PvP will do is bring people together for mutual defense. Which will increase the concentration of nice buildings, and exponentially increase the exposure of those buildings to other players. What is the point of erecting a beautiful building far away from admiring gazes? I hope that the mechanics around TW will take into account neighbours, even "neutral" ones. Give it time. Not only does designing voxels take time, the combat meta is definitively going to change, and I remain optimistic that cool shapes will be better than clunky cubes. Even just the introduction of atmospheric drag, on the advent of atmo combat, will mean ships have to be designed to fight under those conditions (not necessarily improving space constructs, but it's a start). I wish NQ would talk to us about their plans for TW and the combat mechanics, so we could argue the merits of actual plans, instead of debating in terms of total hypotheticals, but for now we can remain optimistic that NQ aren't newbs at this, and have at least given consideration to your valid concerns about preservation of a "culture", and my concerns about the dumb-ass combat meta (not that we're the only people with these concerns, by any means).

Middle mouse for continous mining? I think I picked it up from one of the "mining tips" posts that were about on here earlier in the month. 1) it shouldn't take you an hour per component. If it's taking you that long, you've acquired a "ship beyond your means". 2) there are repair bays which will repair your voxel damage, but they require fully-repaired elements (they'll replace damaged ones with fresh if you provide them). So even the recognised "repair your ship fully" option doesn't repair elements. They are, and should, require attention and spannerwork. What you're asking for isn't "making gameplay slicker", it's fundamentally changing a facet of gameplay. Don't hold your breath waiting for this change. It is working as designed. Except for the RSI.

The only thing about the OP that is vaguely right is that you need to be able to middle-mouse-click to repair, like you can for mining (and ctrl-z for autorun). Still should take as long, and use the exact same amount of scrap, but saves the RSI. And autorepeat should work for the arrow keys in Build Mode, too... no need for a toggle, in that case, though

It's weird how it doesn't do this to everyone's rig. Not judging, just saying there's something going on somewhere...

Since you have on joaocordeiro (and pretty much unrelated to the issue, as far as I know), can you tell me: does the AGG a) need to be pointed in any particular direction (like other engines)? b) get blocked by other bits of the construct if they're "in the way" (also like other engines)? I'm asking out of curiosity, and apologies for being a bit OT.

You understand enough to propose some sane and, I would think, practical solutions. A frequent solution to this in RW is to have the radar actually rotate... since we don't have animated elements, it could be charitably assumed that current radars do actually rotate, and any appearance of unidirectionality is a limitation of graphics not in-game technology. Combat radars (target acquisition in fighters, for example) are often unidirectional for both volume and functional considerations, and I think that there should be options of having rotating arrays as well as fixed ones, with relevant advantages and disadvantages wrt size and weight. I think the current HP model is poor. Things carry on working at 100% efficiency until they are completely destroyed. Then they take trivial amounts of work to get working again. It would be better if the 'working' cutoff was variable, so a radar with 1000 HP stops working when it's taken 100, but isn't destroyed until it's taken a thousand, whereas a command seat, say, stops working when it's taken 50%, and a wing stops working at 90% damage... Sadly, I think sliding scales of "reduced" efficiency as damage was taken would impose too much compute burden for real time combat, though having a performance curve for each element would be ideal. I disagree with this point, since the sensor-bearing vessel knows what its accelerations are and can compensate with its pointing, especially using agile phased-array emitters. The shooter's motion should have no effect on their accuracy given the weapons are pointed by computer, not by the operator. The potential motion of the target should have large effects though, increasing as distance increases. Some measure of the quantity of G used by or known to be available to the type of target, once it's identified (criteria should be affected by what has been observed and what the target actually has available to use - if the predictor algorithm only assumes a 6G position envelope, and the target actually has 9G available, the predictor may be very wrong) should affect the chances of a successful hit. Using current radial velocity is a quick and dirty placeholder, which ought to have no place in the release combat model: hitting a thing moving in a straight line is a trivial lead calculation in space combat where it's computers doing the aiming. 100% agree. Sensor cross section should matter. Core size will have an indirect effect, of course, since a smaller vessel designed along the same principles of sig reduction would have a smaller sig, and why would you build a vessel on an S that you could fit on an XS? But the signature of the hull shouldn't actually include the core size in its calculations. Even if it was as crude as having 6 values (one for each axis direction), it would be effective. The maths is well known and could readily be calculated at ship build time. It'd be nice if combat damage changed the sig, but again, that's probably a step to far for the hamsters. The emissions characteristics of a vessel should also affect its detection range and how hard it is to target. A ship with its radars off, engines off and a well-designed low sig hull should be a "hole in space", relying on passive sensors, at which point their targets can start to evade detection themselves, by going dark, and not burning their drives. A passive threat detector, and a non-targeting (therefore smaller, lighter and cheaper) radar would both help civilian ships evade interception. Or (in the case of the hazard radar) make them have a high enough sig to be locked onto... But civilians need passive sensors too, so they can see those attack ships lighting up their drives, and start evasive maneuvers. This is, indeed, an insanity. I could forgive a space/notspace boundary if you were allowed to connect both an atmo radar and a space radar to your chair, but you can't. I can see the reasoning behind not allowing radars to work in safe zones: it stops people loitering there with impunity, then bursting out, and it stops people in High Guard tracking potential targets deeper in the gravity well, but I think the reasoning is deeply flawed, and it, as you say, makes no physical sense. If you can't see where the ambushers are waiting outside the safe zone, you can't actively avoid them. Denying lockon should be enough. And let a seat have both kinds of radar. Yeah, the whole UI sucks. Our shipwright was trying to make improvements in LUA the other day, but the hooks seem to have been disabled in order to prevent automated weapons stations. It'd be nice if people could sell better HUDs. All this is widely known, even to the layperson. I am sure the current combat systems are placeholders, and hope that they will be seen to be very crude ones by the time they get back to working on combat. The whole thing needs a good going over and complete retooling. But sensors would be a good place to start.

It has been founding principle of the game that there would be pervasive, FFA PvP. To anyone who came to this game not knowing and accepting that, to the point that they won't play if it remains, I say, "Thank you for your donation of 20 bucks to a game you want to see succeed but don't want to play." Moosegun has made eleventy billion good and salient points. And they are an industrialist. The primary reason for eventual militarisation of all volume in the game (apart from the "neutral safe ground" of the Sanc Moon(s)), as I see it, is that if there is a safe space where all resources can be obtained, the concept of territory being held becomes moot. You won't need to fight for resources because you can just get them in the safe zone. So the only reason to fight will be "for the love of combat", which is meaningless and hollow in the context of setting up a "civilisation". Right now, every resource can be obtained risk-free, and the danger is in moving it from place to place. In EvE, you can't get everything in HiSec; the rewards are predominantly in 0.0 space, with Hi-Lo-Nul being the "game progression". The answer to the title question of the thread is "not any time soon", or at least I hope that's the case. Not because I don't want pervasive FFA, but because the game systems are not yet ready for it. There should be safe zones in space right up until the systems for territory warfare go live. And there should be a big "We're backing the game up now. If it goes pear-shaped, we'll be rolling back to the state at this date," notice posted weeks in advance and all over the Internet (not that this will happen; NQ will probably sneak TW in on a Tuesday night patch and then announce it on MySpace ;} ). Before TW can happen, they need to sort out the dog's breakfast that is materials and make space combat actually function in some sort of plausible way with roles for all classes of ship. The current meta is boring. You need TW in place so that, if the civilisation has the will, pirates and criminals can be hunted down and wiped from the place of whatever den of vice and iniquity they infest, else swatting them out of the sky becomes a never-ending chore. And that TW has to have mechanisms in place to make that wiping-out costly and expensive, so that it's not just a matter of glassing a planet and calling it done. It has been suggested that PvP is contrary to the lore because humanity would have passed the point of waging war by the time the arkship got to where "we are" in game. I'd suggest that this is primarily irrelevant, since the game's founding principles include war. If you must, it's trivial to think of reasons why such a speculate might not be the case. But essentially, that's just fluff, and a degree of fluff that pales into insignificance compared to all the "handwaving" that has to go into making the technology "work" for the purposes of game play. It has been suggested that space PvP is for gankers and griefers. I counter that there are corps out there who have set themselves up to be "protectors". Without PvP, that becomes a meaningless role in the world. Space PvP *is*. At the moment, a lot of folks are just heading out there looking for something, anything to shoot at. If it shoots back, that's a bonus, but most things don't, and the loot is a consolation prize. Another key part of the civilisation puzzle that is heretofore missing is communication. Without message boards where people can offer jobs, commerce is mediated entirely by the markets and restricted to known-to-the-game objects (materials, elements and quanta). It is difficult to offer services or constructs for sale or to buy. Until such a mission system exists, there's no commonly-available way to engage escorts or call for help or rescue or revenge justice. That's another thing that needs to be in place before the current safe zones are dropped back. It's very simple: if you don't want to PvP, get someone else to do it for you. Or take the risk and suck it up. Or you can sortof PvP by taking measures to mitigate your risk: would you rather spend a bit more fuel and time and arrive having dodged the blockade (with the added frisson of watching the out-of-position attacker stive to cut an intercept course, and fail before you drop into the safe zone), or do you want to save that fuel and time and increase the risk of a successful intercept by flying CoM-CoM. Hauling is boring. Being chased and applying your brain to evading pursuit and intercept should be embraced as enhancements to the game. Maybe it's a bit more complicated than I said at the start of the paragraph. But it doesn't have to be. Commerce raiding is something that naval transport has had to deal with since the days of the Sea Peoples. East Indiamen used to carry a few light cannon to deter pirates on their way to collect valuable shipments. Spanish galleons fetching gold and silver back from the New World were some of the best-protected ships that the wrights of the time could build. A convoy of Gold Ships was way beyond even the capabilities of the best-organised raiders sponsored by hostile military powers; they had to wait for inclement weather to scatter the elements and deal with the ones they could find in detail before they regrouped. If you're going into space, you need to be more like the C16th and 17th Spanish (without the colonial attitude and genocide), and you don't even need to deal with space weather. PvP is part of the game. You can either accept that, embrace it and join in the fun, or be unhappy any time you need to head somewhere you might get jumped. If you think you're being ganked, get your own gang. If you think you're being griefed, stop being an easy target. If you don't want to do either of those things, just stop. The game has always been about building civilisations and including PvP. If you don't want to do either of those things, don't be surprised if the game is hard. A thousand hermits living in the boonies and not interacting outside the market place is not a civilisation, by the way.

Which is why the devs wanted to rasie the subscription bar to a 3 month, 20 buck minimum, to try and stop the "idly curious" from leaving trash behind. And why they need to set a timer on the parking areas for some form of clearup.

And if all you're shifting is 20T, stick it in your pockets! Word. There is at least one space-and-atmo ship that can't break atmo without modification. They're barely worth the parts price, and not even that, for beginners, because they don't even get to learn anything like they would if they bought the bits and used them to build a ship that worked. Some additional hovers might help get it off the ground at 'level'. Add more push to get the speed above a crawl: atmo engines. Do not neglect the airbrakes! Being able to stop is more important than being able to go! While they, I agree, shouldn't be necessary, the first 2 levels of all the skills are very cheap and quick to learn and give a healthy boost to the underwhelming performance of the vehicle. If you've no one to help, even learning the Lv1 atmo engine and hover placement skills and just deleting the element and using backspace to put it back will combine with your 'personal' skills for even more of a boost.

Things should be a lot more complicated than that. The sensor cross section of the target should matter. The energy production of the target should matter. Larger ships should be able to carry better sensors and (if so equipped) be able to detect smaller ships at comparable, or even greater ranges. But combat ships should be able to gakk freighters if the civvy shows up in their AO unescorted. A combat ship ought to have the delta-vee to be able to intercept a loaded freighter. Band-aids on the current system (which, I agree, sucks, pretty much) aren't going to help.

This needs a sticky. Haven't tried it yet; hope it's "as advertised". Will be poking our industrialist in this direction.

If your PC is struggling, that won't help matters. Have you deleted your cache? That gets big realllll fast around the markets because there are so many variable voxels; maybe it's causing you problems. I'm assuming you've relogged since you started having the problem; I had control problems in a dynamic (no bucking, but the cockpit elements did get borked) a couple of days ago that needed me to restart the whole client from the Windows icon again, before they sorted themselves out. Not even a relog was sufficient, so if you've been leaving the client up between play sessions, might be worth killing it and starting again.

Heh. Nicely put. There needs to be more juniper bushes about... Technically, not very. I suspect that a lot of MMO players don't expect to need to, is all, and don't know what to do when they find their lonely efforts unsatisfying. "I can't solo everything, so the game is broken, because I could do everything on my own in [insert MMO of choice where that was largely the case]". Absolutely. I think it's just 'not what (some) people expect'. Not saying they're right to expect to be self-sufficient, it's just, as you say, a different way of looking at the game, based on misconceptions about it. And long may your flexibility and willingness to work with people benefit all involved.

The basic speeder has 5 airbrakes already... any more won't make a difference Standard speeders are a bit rubbish, but I don't think they're uncontrollable bucking broncos as you describe, generally, or there'd be more reports of it. I don't know enough to make any more suggestions, I'm afraid. You are clear of any obstructions, I assume?

Alt-V will open a dialog box to set what you see when you do press V. Hex borders should be there by default though.

It shouldn't be. I'd raise a ticket pronto. Then go look at YouTube.

No. You have two options: subscribe or find someone to provide you with one of the beta keys that came with the pledges.

I'm sure and certain NQ have already made the decisions that will affect the form of Territory Warfare at the fundamental code level because it gets harder and harder to make any changes to the core code the later you leave it. All the speculation and suggestion you can type regarding the fundamental basis of TW are too late. That said, you raise some points which might be worth noodling about. The fact that even the "shield/timer" mechanic is speculation makes it difficult though. So I'm going to assume the fundamentals support a "Territory Shield" approach, let's look at how that basic system can accommodate the thrust of your points. Every decisive battle reaches a point where it needs to be "pushed to conclusion". While it's fondly held by some that violence never solved anything, it's unfortunately the case that this is not true. It should be possible using political and economic power to deny the attacker the chance to push for conclusions using military power, however, or give the militarily weaker (individually) defender an advantage to counter the military advantage of the attacking force. There isn't going to be any detail like that on a single hex. The scale is too small anyway. It will be abstracted into the shield mechanics. Maybe a shield needs to have an unclaimed hex, or one friendly to the attacker, next to it, so that assault can only come from the edge of held "friendly" territory. There would have to be a way, even more involved/expensive/time consuming of making a hostile landing from orbit without breaching surface defenses. The third dimension is, after all, a thing. Maybe the "shield attack thing" needs feeding with "stuff" to keep the "shield timer" ticking down, and maybe the defender can feed their shield generator "other/the same stuff" to keep the shield up. Maybe the "shield attack thing" needs maintaining by a construct which has to be present continuously to continue its work. That would mean that the attackers would need to defend the "shieldbreaker" construct from either the defender, or their allies, or their paid help. Maybe it would be impossibe to completely prevent the shield collapsing, but the "net result" of the shield mechanic might bestow an advantage on the party who "did the best at it". To extend the "feeding the shield/shieldbreaker" concept into this, perhaps if the defenders put more ming into the shield than the attackers put into the breaker, the defender's constructs get some sort of shield or weapon boost or the like for the eventual combat. None of that needs changes to the core code that says "can attack constructs True/False". It's all surface dressing.

Can you screenshot your design? There may be features of it that need amendment. It isn't necessarily bug territory.

I think the first problem is that people are expecting these job hookups to be in-game, and the systems simply aren't in place yet. If people don't know to look out-of-game, or how to, if they're aware there might be possibilities, the connections won't be made. The second problem is one of trust. MMO players have an unfortunate reputation for trying to shaft the little guy. I absolutely don't think it's deserved, in "90%" of cases, but there are enough bad apples that even with a game-mediated mission system, people would fear the scammer. The other side of the perception is that "NPC" missions are 100% safe investments (as long as you complete them, ofc) where payment is guaranteed upon completion of the delivery/quota/whatever. Please be quite clear that I'm not accusing anyone, especially you and yours Moosegun; you're businessfolk, and shafting people tends to be bad business in the long run, and you're probably at least as ethical as the next guy, since you've got sustainable relationships with your contractors. It's a systemic problem, rather than an individual one. Hopefully, honest actors like Moosgun's outfits will be able to erode that historical perception. It's a good plan. Sell it in tiny quantities at slightly inflated prices so that people who need detailing supplies can get what they want. Aye, that's probably true. It's a baggage that comes with people's perceptions of an MMO which is essentially a single player game with other people running around in it as background. Actually playing with and cooperating on an ongoing basis with other people before the "team sport" of "end game raiding" is unexpected to most MMO players. They're expecting to "grind to level cap" on their own and then start looking for a team. Which is sad, and I hope people realise they need connections and are able to find them before becoming discouraged.

Have you raytraced the seat, rightclicked and run the default autoconfigure?

Your hex is nowhere near halved by the time you get past any depth ore is found at. There's a linear relationship between the depth you dig and the diameter of your claim; you'd have to get halfway to the centre of the planet before your diggable hex was half as far across. Someone calculated Alioth's radius to be about 50km, so you would have to dig down to 25000m below "sea level" for the width of your diggable area to halve. That's a long, pointless tunnel.

This really isn't going to be an issue. If you're still disconnected by the time the defense timer (or whatever) drops the shield, you're boned unless you have organised friends to help you via out-of-game comms. And if you don't have any friends who could do this for you, you're going to be boned anyway because the people who've dropped your shield will just roll over a single player anyway. They wouldn't have dropped your shield if they didn't think they could take you.